Textual Analysis of Se7en

The Pre title sequence shows the main character Lieutenant William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) standing in his kitchen the atmosphere is dark and sterile, which makes the character have a sense of mysterious about him, he is looking mysterious in the first scene and you can also tell a lot about the characters personality by just looking at the props within his kitchen. On the side there are animal ornaments, which could show, the character is well travelled. There is ask a chess board on the table which indicates he is very intelligent. There is only natural light used which a appears to be shinning through the windows, however the kitchen is still dark and not much light i shown. The scene is set in the morning before the man is going to work, we know this because he is dressed in a suit and is tipping his coffee/tea down the sink, this could show he works in an office and doesn't want to be late for work. There is ambient sound playing through out this scene of people talking,this could show he might live in a city.

On the side board he has a various range of old objects such as an American police badge, Switch blade, pen and glasses. Each item is placed with the same amount of space between them, this shows he is well organised and has an OCD when it comes to things being done. Also, the neatness of his bed, could indicate he has a military background and picked up habits from his past. The clothing the mysterious character is wearing isn't modern, however it is old fashioned, he is wearing an old detectives coat. Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt),  He is wearing a leather jacket and has some facial hair which could shows he is a rebel and is laid back and modern appearance. It goes straight into a two shot camera angle of  Detective David Mills and Lieutenant William Somerset, from this we see the distance between both characters and there body language towards each other, It is also showing the age difference and ethnicity. Detective David Mills has his arms cross showing he is getting annoyed and defensive.

Lieutenant William Somerset is shown to be siting in his bed reading a book listening to the metronome to drown out the ambient sound of the fighting and dog barking outside his flat. Everything goes calm before the storm, this indicates that things are going to change for Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman in the next seven days. From just watching the Pre title sequence it has told us a lot about the characters,and draws the audiences attention.

There is non-diegetic music playing over the top of the opening credits, this music has a high frequency. The opening credits aren't calm, its rushed and makes the audience jump, and it doesn't let them focus on one thing in the book as it goes to quick.  It focuses on a detectives book, we can tell this by the detective pieces which are being added into the book. There is an extreme close up of a man shaving his finger tips, the camera angle could be because they don't want the audience to see the surroundings yet. The fact the man is shaving his finger tips could indicate that he doesn't want to show his identity. In the book there is also pictures of naked children in black and white and the 'man' is gathering pieces of hair, which could be from victims, he uses a black pen and draws over the people eyes, this gives the audience the impression his guilty of something, or what his become and he can't look at the eyes of the innocent children. At this point the music becomes up tempo. He spells the word 'god' out of  dollar, this could show he has issues with religion, and doesn't like how god is linked with greed.

After the opening credits, it goes straight into a dark atmosphere, the prop used is a torch this indicates back to the opening credits of a detectives book. The light is shined on a man sat down with his hands and leg tied up, and he appears to be dead. The rain outside shows its not a happy place to be. There is ambient sound of a police radio. Greed s written on the floor in blood, this links back to the dollar in the opening credits, which shows a religions link.

Preliminary Task Evaluation

180° Degree Rule.

 When we made our short movie, we had to take in to account the 180° rule throughout the project. The 180° rule is the main rule for film making and it shouldn't be broken. If the rule is broken the whole film starts to not make sense to the audience. The 180° degree rule is the position of the camera, you have to imagine there is an invisible line in which the camera stays behind,  If the camera crosses that line then it has broken the 180° rule and will make the characters or objects appear to have  moved, when it hasn't. We used this rule at all times when making out short movie. Another rule that we used is Match on action, this is when it appears there are two cameras when really there is only one. It has been edited to look like this. We used match on action when Ryan was walking out of the room, we filmed him from inside the room and then outside the room, making sure we still went along with the 180° degree rule. Eye line match is another camera angle which we used, eye line match is when the camera is eye level with the character and the characters and having eye connection. We used this when Claudia noticed Ryan walking into the room and Ryan shouting " what are you doing".




In terms of film making i believe it went well, we payed attention to the storyboard at all times and it gave us a rough idea of what camera shots were coming next and where the characters ( Ryan+Claudia) were standing next. There wasn't a huge variety of places to choose from around the college but n the end we decided to use the teachers meeting room, as it looked like an office and had a phone on the wall, which went along with the storyboard. We also used the corridor outside of the meeting room to show Ryan walking away from the room. 

To put the film together we used Adobe Premiere, which has all the necessary film editing on it. I learnt how to import our film off the SD card. Once this had been done we had to cut parts out that didn't fit in. we then joined the video clips together. After the film had been put together making sure we had different camera angles we then added titles we started off with the film production name 'Harc Production Studies' straight after this was the title 'I.D' and then staring Claudia Walker + Ryan Dobson, at the end we added incidental music to give the film more of a dramatic feel to it, at the parts the characters were talking we had to turn the sound down and the voices up, so that we could hear them.